


in my bonehouse

by agonies (Hyb)



Series: work song (crawl home) [3]
Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Anxiety Attacks, Food Porn, M/M, Morally Ambiguous Characters, Past Violence, Recovery, Undercover Missions, Unresolved Romantic Tension, extreme creative license with intelligence agency jurisdiction, friendly sexual healing, just bros hanging out having a threesome, mentions of smoking, taekai - established
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-09-29 16:29:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20439059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: The last person to call him Ravi is Hyuk, three minutes before the raid.[Wonshik isn't ready to go home. So he goes to New York.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the previous installments in this series are taekai centric and not strictly essential to wonshik's story, but are recommended for context

The last person to call him Ravi is Hyuk, three minutes before the raid. They share a smoke at the window as the deal goes down, all flimsy nonchalance while they grip their knives inside their jackets. Wonshik counts his breaths to stay calm. The seconds of each inhale, of holding the smoke in his lungs, of sighing it out again. 

These are the seconds, grains of sand in an hourglass that will never be turned over again, in which Hyuk is still his family, and _ Ravi _ would kill for him.

Taekwoon will call him by his name again, finally, he thinks. But he doesn't stick around to find out how it sounds on his tongue.

Past security, his passport tucked in his back pocket and his mouth still sour with cola, he finds Taemin waiting for him.

Not right away, of course. He’s not obvious about it, his nature would never allow that. Wonshik hovers in the vicinity of baggage claim though he could fit all of himself in a carryon with room to spare and has nothing more to collect. He scans without urgency instead of calling Taemin to ask where he is, and eventually he finds him seated along a wall, the sprawl of a family with children rifling through their luggage obscuring him. He has his legs crossed, tablet resting on one knee, but he’s staring back at Wonshik and he waggles his eyebrows in greeting. Pleased with himself, like a cat.

Up close, he thinks it wasn’t just clever camouflage. Taemin looks different in his suit, demure government gray to match his tidy, irreproachable haircut. His face isn’t so hungry as when Wonshik knew him. He can’t find the starved angles he remembers. Taemin was young, then, and so was Wonshik, but they were never the same. 

“You’re wearing a tie,” he says thickly, foggy with jetlag. “Clown.” The way the time zones have stacked together, he spent the better part of a day in the air and still arrived at nearly the hour he departed. Time travel. 

“Should’ve shaved before you left,” Taemin assesses. He doesn’t offer to take his bag. “Looks like you’ve been licking the inside of a coffee filter.”

Five years doesn’t feel so long, suddenly. He’s the same Taemin who would leave his stale little apartment in the middle of the night for a run, the front door unlocked, while Wonshik still had his pants down.

The sun is high but Wonshik, who couldn’t bring himself to sleep on the plane, somehow passes out in the back of the cab as it brakes and lurches through traffic. He wakes when Taemin shakes his elbow and nearly forgets his suitcase in the trunk. He knows a little English, enough for kilos and grams and purity, but Taemin’s easy patter with the driver goes over his head like a wave.

The apartment is small, cleaner and airier than the matchbox over a hidden tattoo shop that he’s called home for the past three years. Lots of plants in the windows. A sentimental part of him wants to smile at that. Taemin’s old place was like a coffin, maybe because he was never there long enough to keep anything alive. 

Then he smells seared meat and acid surges from his gut up to his throat.

“Oh, you made good time.” The man who steps out of the kitchen is Korean. He’s as tall as Wonshik. His face is clean cut handsome, his posture upright, and in a foggy, elongated moment of unreality he’s eating up the distance and ducking his head politely to Wonshik before he kisses Taemin’s cheek. Quick, absent. With the ease of familiarity. 

But Taemin is staring back at Wonshik, his mouth twitching something too small and knowing to be a smile. “Jinki didn’t tell you.”

“Deputy Director Lee must have forgotten.” He shouldn’t be surprised that Taemin lives like this. Even years ago he operated under a halo of protection, talked about Jinki and Jonghyun like insufferable older brothers and not the most fearsomely respected officials of their generation.

“Maybe he thought you didn’t have any room to judge,” the man says, low and mild. Beside him Taemin shrugs, unrepentant. As if to say he answers to a higher power than intelligence officers or Wonshik’s privacy.

The man introduces himself as Jongin, wrestles Wonshik’s bag from his shoulder with a surprisingly strong grip, and directs him to the bathroom down the hall to freshen up. He’s sunny, but stubborn— he talks like he expects to be heard.

Taemin leans in the doorway, loosening his tie as he watches Wonshik splash cold water on his face and chafe himself dry. “Jinki probably thought getting you somewhere safe was more important than whether you’d be comfortable with my boyfriend.”

“Or he thought we might actually talk to each other before I got here,” he huffs, amused despite himself. “What did you tell him?”

Taemin blinks. It’s a small, human tell. He never had those before. “Everything. I tell Jongin everything.” He shifts his weight as if to leave and grant him some privacy but pauses, hand on the frame. “We’re getting married. You can hold your congratulations.” 

Pivoting too fast, he clocks his shoulder hard on the wall to grab Taemin’s sleeve. That wouldn’t have hurt once, but he’s so thin now, everything hurts. “Congratulations,” he says, and means it. “You deserve it.”

Even with the suit and the tie and the haircut, Taemin looks young when he smiles. “I don’t, really. But thanks for saying so.”

“The case won’t be prepared for trial for a few months, at the very least,” Jinki said. He didn’t like being called by his title, not in private. Maybe that’s why he asked Wonshik out of doors and away from the weight of his office, bearing paper cups of terrible burnt coffee. “You’ll have more commendations than you know what to do with. You must be ready to go home.”

After days of statements, repeating himself until the words ran together, he was feverish and lost in his own skin. He hadn’t known it was morning again until they stepped outside. When his tired eyes settled on nothing he saw Taekwoon in the sea of agents on the scene. After the raid. Everything will be before and after the raid now, he thought.

Taekwoon’s agency windbreaker made him look broad, respectable. The misting rain hung curls in his hair. He didn’t have to cast about searching for Wonshik at a distance, he didn’t even need to meet his eyes. Taekwoon held him in his orbit like a moon, a satellite. Like an extension of his own body.

Wonshik stared across the sunny courtyard thick with irises until his vision blurred and he couldn’t make out what Jinki was saying beside him. Every time he blinked he expected to wake up and stare at the same water stain in his ceiling as he had for the past three years. To gather himself to lie. Then Jaehwan would call and pass along an address, and Hyuk would hang off his arm, and One Eye would tell him to get a haircut.

He tried to imagine reaching out to brush the back of Taekwoon’s hand, tracing the veins like rivers. He tried to picture sitting at his mother’s table and looking her in the eye.

“I’m not,” he said thickly, and Jinki was quiet. “I’m not ready.”

When he met Taekwoon, the pair of them granted an empty office to get acquainted, he reminded him of Taemin. Not a resemblance but something like a scent, like humming a melody when he’d forgotten the words. Some backwards math of lethal angles and opaque expressions.

But _ you sort of look like the guy I used to fuck _ wasn’t an icebreaker, not with the handler who was about to be Wonshik’s only lifeline. Who never once told him _ everything will be fine _ or _ I won’t let you get hurt. _

When he stretches out on the sofa bed, a spring digging at his spine, he hears low murmurs through the bedroom door. He can’t make out the words.

“Eat more,” Jongin frowns at him, putting away a mountain of eggs and rice while Wonshik picks at his bowl. “Taemin says if you don’t put on some weight you’ll fall through the floorboards and we’ll be sweeping you out of the basement.”

In the shower he can feel his ribs and the jut of his hipbones. This past year he’s hardly been able to sleep, or eat either, the mouthfuls he forced down tasting like ash. It was easier subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, lean and hollow and watchful.

They aren’t alone together long, thankfully. He doesn’t know how to talk to the man who makes Taemin happy. But an hour and a half after Taemin straightens his tie and departs for the consulate, Jongin glides off to rehearsal and leaves him in merciful quiet. Wonshik scrapes the remains of his bowl into the garbage disposal.

If Taekwoon were watching him this would never fly. He’d claim he’d ordered too much meat, as if he couldn’t eat an entire cow on his own, and he’d shovel food into Wonshik’s bowl until he snapped at him to stop.

“You look like a skeleton,” he’d say. “You’re hurting my eyes.”

“Better,” Taemin says, and adds another plate to the barbell while Wonshik wheezes for breath, flat on his back like a corpse ready for autopsy. In the early light, Taemin looms over him, unmoved. “Look at you, almost strong enough to fight a wet cat. Maybe a kitten.”

Before he went undercover, before three years of his life turned inside out, he made his arrangements with his handler. Emergency contacts, flags, and standing appointments. The first Wednesday of every month meant matinees at an old theater, and then there were football matches at the weekends when Ulsan played at home. The bars change, but the ritual is the same.

“I like this guy more than the keeper they had in the first half,” Wonshik might say, hardly following, just to watch Taekwoon’s lip curl. 

“The teams switch sides at the half,” Taekwoon would sigh. He had the right demeanor for these meetings, out in the open. Face always bored and remote, voice so muted he forced you to lean in to hear him. In oversized sweaters and painted on jeans he could pass for some indolent, professionally pretty boy lost in the wrong part of town. 

They would meet at the corner of the bar, any bar, and place bills under their glasses in a pantomime bet. Nearly two hours for a match, and Wonshik only needed a fraction of that to report, to communicate in densely vague questions and curt answers. He wondered if Taekwoon made this their ritual just to grant him more time, more rest. But he didn’t want to ask just in case he stopped.

So he would watch the condensation on their glasses, and Taekwoon’s long hands, and he’d watch Ulsan’s new striker on the screen and pretend not to understand formations until Taekwoon grumbled and explained again.

Taekwoon always wore his hair too long for regulation, falling past his ears. For lack of a better distraction from his crackling nerves, Wonshik would rib him about his vanity. His soft hair, his buttery leather jackets, his silver rings. 

Once, when Wonshik called him for an urgent meeting, they crowded together under a doorway while the rain poured down in sheets. Wonshik’s teeth chattered, and not from cold. Taekwoon had raked back his wet hair and just for a moment in the dim he could see a scar slashing along his scalp. Deep, as if gouged in. 

When they met, Jinki having tossed a single packet of chips between them like a peace offering, Taekwoon had said _ what makes you think you’re ready for this _? So toneless and unimpressed that Wonshik wanted to grab him by the collar and yank him face first into the table until he was spitting out teeth. He wanted to rip his shirt down the middle and see if he was as sleek all over as his long unmarked throat.

_ Maybe when it’s your ass on the line you can tell me what you know about it, _he’d snapped back, and Taekwoon never corrected him.

“Stop flinching,” Taekwoon said in the rain. His lashes were wet, like strokes of ink. “Do you think you’re being followed?”

“You could sound a little worried,” Wonshik had bitten off, and all he could see was One Eye pausing, a brow arched too casually, asking where Ravi was last Saturday. They couldn’t reach him, he said.

“Well isn’t it obvious,” Taekwoon had shrugged, minute. Eyes scanning the wet empty road with no symptom of urgency. “If someone is watching us, then I’ll put my tongue in your mouth. What?” he murmured when Wonshik coughed. “You think you don’t give yourself away? You stare at men too much. If they haven’t guessed already, they will sooner or later.”

“What about you?” Wonshik flattened his hand over Taekwoon’s diaphragm through his damp sweater, feeling the contraction of his breath. Taekwoon had a talent for getting him like this, so angry he couldn’t shut up. “You think you don’t give yourself away?”

“Take your hand off me,” Taekwoon sneered, and so he did.

Apparently, Jongin’s dance company is a big deal. They keep him busy with rehearsals for the fall season every day but Monday. On Mondays he and Wonshik are alone in the apartment, and magnanimously Jongin will suggest walks, or taking coffee to the dog park nearby.

“You’re awfully tolerant letting me stay here,” Wonshik comments when Jongin is through making lovelorn noises at a Pomeranian.

“Not like Taemin’s never had to get over being jealous,” Jongin shrugs, sidestepping a woman jogging at speed with a stroller. “Let he who’s never slept with his coworkers cast the first stone, right?

“Don’t get me wrong,” he continues three blocks later, as if without pause. “I’m not a saint. If I thought he’d ever been in love with you, then you wouldn’t be here.”

“What did he say about me?” Wonshik asks at last. Reflexive, like picking a scab. Did Taemin compare him to a dog, he wonders, quick to follow instruction and eager to please.

Jongin pauses in the middle of the sidewalk and eyes him seriously. He has a sweet face, bright eyes like a kid. No wonder Taemin brings him coffee in bed and rubs his sore feet at night.

“He said he could trust you,” Jongin tells him. “I don’t know what you were working on back there. But he said you were brave.”

They lean against a wrought iron fence for a very long time, holding empty cups patterned in Greek key, watching the road. Until the lump in Wonshik’s throat subsides and he blinks the sting of sunlight from his eyes.

“Don’t be brave,” Taekwoon would say, eyes on the match, lips barely moving. “Pretend I’m on your back, calling you an idiot.”

A sudden banging is what batters him awake like hammer meeting nail. It must be the apartment next door, because Jongin doesn’t glance up from his stretches on the living room floor. 

Instead he stares at Wonshik, his white knuckled grip sunk deep into the sofa. He can’t breathe. God, fuck, he can’t breathe. His lungs won’t answer him. He hears himself wheeze but there’s no air.

He doesn’t know when Jongin edges close, or when he takes his hand. When he inhales shakily and tries to let go, Jongin laces their fingers together.

“I can hear you having nightmares,” he says simply. “Sometimes— if I don’t wake Taemin up, he doesn’t remember his.”

When Wonshik is quiet, he squeezes his hand and then rises. Taekwoon moved like that, something as simple as unfolding his body made elegant and economical, but it was martial arts that made him that way, not dance. He liked explaining action movies in Wonshik’s ear at their sticky old cinema.

“Come with me, there’s a café by the studio and if you don’t mind hanging there we can go for a swim at lunch. My shorts will fit you fine.” He never makes Wonshik unpack three years of fear, of lurching awake at night when he dreamed of his door busting in and a gun in his face. Hakyeon never even liked guns, but they were in his dreams, certain as the scar across Taekwoon’s scalp.

Worse, if he starts talking he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop. He’ll try to give shape to the times when Ravi felt more real than anything in his life. Crowded on the floor sharing mountains of fried chicken with Hyuk and Hongbin and feeling warm under the weight of Haekyeon’s approval. Shaking with silent laughter while Jaehwan ran his mouth. Criminals weren’t supposed to be funny, or kind.

If he starts talking he’ll say _ my handler was the only person keeping me sane for three years. He checked on my family. He stitched me up. _Doesn’t gratitude make you sick, he’d want to ask. Wouldn’t it make you afraid, if you thought you might confuse that with love.

_ Do you need me to pull you out, _Taekwoon would always ask in place of goodbye. He never forgot. He always stared somewhere over Wonshik’s shoulder, as if allowing him privacy with the question. _Think about it. Take as much time as you need._

Taemin says he has to look for wedding invitations, but he shrieks at his tablet and drops it on the floor when he does. There are one hundred and twelve _ pages _of designs, he says numbly, then orders takeout and beer. 

They sit on the floor and squint at templates, Jongin’s dinner waiting under a towel on the kitchen counter like a reminder to hurry it up. Wonshik has no eye for fonts and thinks there are too many flowers, but Taemin is worse, says he can’t read all the looping cursive himself. 

The food is good, he realizes. A creamy green curry with chicken and potatoes, so spicy it makes his nose run, good rice, and lukewarm Thai beer. Heckling Taemin’s choices over his shoulder, he’s thinking they never shared a meal together back then, not really. Taemin would call him when he was available, and he rarely needed more than half an hour of his time. 

Taekwoon would eat an entire bowl of spicy chicken feet in front of him, grotesque in his enjoyment like he was demonstrative about nothing else. 

“Finish mine,” Taemin says too casually, and Wonshik realizes his bowl is empty. He doesn’t feel sick. He feels heavy, and warm.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, and shovels down beef and peppers before he can question the return of his appetite. 

“Hey,” he says some time later, when they’re out of beer and Jongin has walked through the front door, kissed the crown of Taemin’s head, and marched straight into the shower. Taemin makes a drowsy, inquisitive sound back. “What’s the craziest thing you ever did for somebody? For a guy,” he adds, then bites his cheek.

Taemin blinks, considering. He’s wearing a shirt for the Mariinsky Ballet, faded and too broad for him in the shoulders. He doesn’t look like he was ever a spy.

“Well I stalked Jongin for three years.” He tilts his bottle back and scowls to find it empty. “Diet stalking. Part time stalking. I told myself I just needed to know he was okay. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You start pulling shit like that, acting like you can protect somebody. What you’re really saying is, _ that’s mine. _”

“Does he know?” Wonshik struggles to assemble a timeline. He never saw Taemin after he finished his long assignment in Japan. He must have met Jongin then, somehow.

“Tell you the truth, I think he’s into it,” Taemin stage whispers, only to raise his bottle when Jongin emerges, hair damp and skin scrubbed pink. “You’re so pretty!” he exclaims, and Jongin rolls his eyes and pads to the kitchen.

“So what did you do?” Taemin asks then, interested, and Wonshik blinks dumbly back at him.

“Oh, it wasn’t— it wasn't me,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from the panic bird by robert phillips


	2. Chapter 2

He measures time in meals, after the days begin to bleed together. 

Morning: coffee with milk, coffee with cream, coffee with golden caramel syrup, coffee over ice, coffee crowned in foam. Leftover pasta salad with Jongin, standing in the kitchen — a hint of vinegar, black pepper, nutty parmesan cheese. Flaky butter pastries that softly shatter under the very first bite, a hundred paper-fine layers breaking on his front teeth, filled with dark chocolate or bright creamy lemon. 

Afternoon: hot dogs doused in sauerkraut and spicy brown mustard, each one heavy as a tire iron in his hand. Blini dolloped in sour cream and caviar like black gems. Dark field greens topped in warm roasted beets and goat cheese, as he watches Taemin and Jongin approach from opposite ends of the street, closing in on the café where he waits, each of them walking half a mile to meet perfectly in the middle with the tips of their shoes aligned. All unspoken grace as Jongin tilts down his chin for a kiss and Taemin cups his cheek like they were apart for months instead of hours.

Evening: noodles and beef, noodles and pork, noodles and shrimp. Fatty tuna and eel and pickeled mackerel. Coffee gelato, pistachio gelato, coconut gelato. Gazpacho and vinho verde when Taemin receives a proof of the wedding invitation and matching save the date card. Wonshik feigns preoccupation with his food while Taemin's mouth twitches and his eyes go suspiciously bright.

"You'll come," Taemin says, and isn't a question. He keeps his head down, tracing the edge of the invitation. "You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Minho champagne drunk."

Even at night he’s hungry. He jolts awake from dreams craving peanut butter straight from the jar, crunchy and too sweet. He devours apples down to slivers standing at the kitchen window in the dark, staring at the blind windows across the street and waiting for the shadows to move, rooted to the spot until light flickers on through the blinds and releases him. The microwave reads half past one when he opens a tin of tuna fish silky with olive oil and eats it with his fingers, flesh to flesh, and through the bedroom wall someone keens and is quiet.

Jongin, he thinks mildly, licking his thumb. It has to be Jongin, unless five years taught Taemin how to beg like that.

It feels like his body is expanding, new spaces blooming from the most inward confines. Like when he draws in breath deep enough he’s lengthening his bones, his lungs lifting up his sternum and ribs like cathedral arches. His hands and feet aren’t so cold all the time. He’s bigger than Jongin now, he realizes with a start, watching him pace the narrow angles of the living room while he chatters to his older sister on the phone and coos to his niece. Wonshik has lashed muscle to his waist again, to his shoulders, his thighs. He can hardly remember what it was like to feel this solid, like the wind won’t pass through him.

When Taemin wakes him early to come lift weights and run grueling sprints, until sweat runs in his eyes and burns, he counts the hours. Time travel. It’s morning here but the light will be fading in Seoul. He wonders if Taekwoon is sitting down to supper. He wonders what he eats, and if he’s alone. They religiously followed Ulsan, a team Taekwoon hardly cared about in the beginning, for three long years. He wonders if Taekwoon still finds a bar and an empty corner seat and watches the door, waiting for Wonshik to show up and explain himself. 

_ Be nice to me, _ he had shivered around his cigarette, eighteen days before the raid. _ For once, just be nice to me. I’m so fucking tired. _

And the lights of the television screen skittered across Taekwoon’s unblinking eyes. He could be so far away in his own skin. He must have been a better agent than Wonshik, before he got shot. 

_ Have I ever had you over for supper? _ Taekwoon asked, airy and casual for the bar, instead of complaining he was better than nice when he stitched Wonshik up, when he checked on Wonshik’s mom and sister, when he remembered his birthday like it mattered, like he was a little kid who needed that sort of thing. _ Come over soon, _ he said_, _ and _ soon _ meant after, _ soon _ meant this will all be over and you can go home. _ I’ll cook for you. Anything you want. _

_ That’s too nice, _ Wonshik had laughed past the constriction of his lungs. _ I don’t believe you. _

_ You heard me. _ Taekwoon glared at the screen as Ulsan celebrated a penalty kick. They were winning. 

What was Hakyeon’s last meal before he was arrested, he wonders. Did he taste it, or was he distracted by the deal, chewing mechanically, a passenger in his own body. Wonshik didn’t see him until that evening, when he was soldered into a black suit like armor. He imagines what One Eye might have eaten before he disappeared, how the taste might have clung to the backs of his teeth.

He wonders how Hyuk is eating in detention, if the cement is cold under his bedding, or if he took the plea bargain. 

Finally, after seven weeks, Taemin and Jongin fight. He'd wondered if they knew how, or if they would carry on serene as plants inclining towards sunlight forever. 

They're hovering in the kitchen doorway when he lets himself in, blood still loud in his ears from his walk, his fingertips pulsing with heat. They go quiet too suddenly, like the air's vanished. Jongin's hair is still tall and stiff from the stage, his eyes smudged with the remnants of his makeup. He hangs from Taemin's elbow and Taemin scowls out the dark window, his jaw tense as wire. 

Out of deference, he steps down the narrow hall and splashes cool water across his face. The nights are still warm, but the days are waning faster. It's morning now back home, he thinks. Taekwoon will be awake, maybe home for the weekend, chucking his cat under the chin, the one he never talked about that left pale stray hairs on his sweaters. 

Hakyeon will be in a ten by seven holding cell with five other inmates, waiting for a meeting with his lawyer, waiting for his forty-five minutes of fresh air in the yard. He thinks how tigers never look right in cages, not even if you’ve seen the damage done by their teeth and claws.

From the kitchen he hears a murmur, and a sharp retort.

“I’m starving, everybody want the usual from Jaiya?” he calls, casual, voice echoing off the tile. “Extra fish cakes? I’ll be back.”

Maybe he allows too much time, walking until he can see the leafy fringes of the park and back again before he ducks in a humid entry to place their order, chewing a toothpick as he waits. Maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing, because his stomach doesn’t flip in surprise when he puts key to lock again and finds Taemin sucking Jongin off in the kitchen doorway, his shoulders tight and intent, Jongin’s golden throat tipped back and his lashes trembling over his cheeks as he whines. 

It happens very quickly, in the space of heartbeats. The loud click of the door behind him, Jongin’s eyes snapping open, his fingers clawing at Taemin’s hair, spine bowing as he comes. He’s flushing red now, with mortification or his orgasm, yanking his sweats up his hips, still riveted on Wonshik’s face.

And Taemin is nonchalant, fetching tamarind soda in a glass bottle from the refrigerator. His posture says he knows exactly where Wonshik stands. He doesn’t need to look. His throat bobs as he swallows again, swallows salt, swallows Jongin, before he knocks the bottle cap off on the counter’s edge. 

“Is that dinner?” he asks pointedly, voice so wrecked that beside him Jongin squeezes his eyes shut and shivers. 

“Han Sanghyuk is in protective custody,” Jinki assures him, his deputy director voice slipping into something warm and concerned across the line. “No prior convictions, just like you said. The prosecutor’s offer was generous, he won’t serve any time— I wish you’d asked me sooner. I didn’t realize you two were so close.”

“Thought you might’ve asked me to convince him,” Wonshik admits. He swallows, then holds the phone away from his face when his throat goes thick like poured cement. “That could have backfired. He’ll hate me, after the trial. When he knows who I really am.”

“Maybe,” Jinki muses. No bullshit, Wonshik always liked that about him. “Give it time. Meeting you saved his life, whether he’s ready to see that or not.”

“Hakyeon saved him first,” his tongue snaps without his permission, and Jinki is quiet.

“At the trial,” Jinki says mildly. “Call him by his full name, or the criminal known as N. Be careful with that. And Wonshik?” He lets the silence hang over the line. “When you come back, you’ll be assigned a therapist. I hope you don’t think I’ve forgotten.”

After dark, Jongin nods off against his shoulder on the couch while Taemin avidly watches a zombie movie. He’s very warm, just like Hyuk would be, huddling at his side in December. Waiting outside a warehouse for a call. 

_ This is all Hyuk knows, _ he’d told Jinki, urgent. _ He was a runner when he was twelve. He was alone, he was scared. _

He wants to ask Jinki sometimes, or maybe God, who any of them are to judge after all. He never used to have questions like that, he never used to doubt. That was before he met Hakyeon, before he met Taekwoon. He used to stare at the blue light limning Taekwoon’s profile and think, if the first boy I ever kissed had been more like you, maybe I’d be a different person today. If I met you when I was seventeen I would have followed you anywhere. No matter who you were. No matter what you asked me to do. 

“One Eye is missing,” he chattered into the phone. It was late in the fall and Ulsan’s season was over. He wondered if Taekwoon would meet him for a drink anyway, just to screw his head back on straight. “Hakyeon thinks it was Lau. I’ve never seen him panic like this.”

“So he trusts you,” Taekwoon hummed. “That’s good. Use it.”

“You never tell me not to fuck anyone,” Wonshik had snapped back, rattled by his composure. “Don’t you think you should?”

“Should I?” Taekwoon echoed, so fucking remote. He wished he could see his face. His hands, sometimes his twitching fingertips would give him away. “When have you ever given me reason to doubt your self control?”

On Sunday Jongin has another performance, and Taemin prowls the apartment like a restless cat for an hour before snapping at Wonshik to grab his jacket, it’s windy outside. 

After making it his business to adapt to a criminal’s moods for years, flexibility is easy. He follows Taemin to the cab and doesn’t talk, accepts his ticket at the museum after Taemin pays. It’s crowded already, milling with life. Taemin meanders without comment, so Wonshik slips in the plastic wrapped headphones he was given and lets a stranger’s voice lull him in Korean.

Here are tapestries of kings and princes and angels, a parade of names he doesn’t recognize. Here is the parable of the prodigal son. Here is a Nubian temple, sandstone so vast and unfeeling that every place Wonshik has ever seen feels ephemeral by comparison. The paintings run together, Taemin walking faster than the audio guide can follow, but they both linger in unspoken agreement under carved wooden masks that tower higher than any man could stand, so living and watchful that Wonshik goes dizzy with staring. 

Did you ever want to be a warrior, when you were a kid, he nearly asks. Did you ever think life was that simple.

Finally Taemin veers off course and leads him to a rooftop bar, chilly in the shade and hot where the sun meets the back of his neck. From a heinously overpriced menu, so far as Wonshik’s sharpened sense of the currency exchange suggests, Taemin orders them vodka cocktails bright with grapefruit and hibiscus, then rattles off a list of dishes so long their waiter’s mustache twitches in disbelief. 

“Jongin thinks I should invite my mother to the wedding,” Taemin announces without fanfare, but only after he’s drained half his cocktail without pausing for air. 

Wonshik chokes, just a little, vodka stinging his sinuses. “And what do you think?” he manages, more hoarse than he would prefer.

“Did anyone ever tell you what happened in Fukuoka?” Taemin glances out over the vast greenery of the park, the skyline hung with blue shadows beyond.

“Is that where you were?” Wonshik mumbles, not quite convincing. No one talks about what happened to Taemin, but there’s a shape to what goes unsaid, an absence that suggests enough. “Have you talked to your mother since then?”

“Ah,” Taemin sighs, squinting harder at the middle distance. He shoves a slice of watermelon into his mouth when the waiter returns with their salads. “That was a good guess,” he says quietly, when they’re tucking into the main course. Wonshik didn’t know tomatoes could taste like this, deep and rich on his tongue even after he swallows.

When his plate is clear he runs his thumb over the base of his wine glass, some white from California that came preassigned with the cauliflower dish. He’s so full he should stop eating but he accepts half a crab cake when Taemin forks it over unasked.

“I haven’t been to church in a long time,” he says, and Taemin looks up sharply. “Not since before— the assignment.”

“You’re not ready yet,” Taemin says with infinite understanding, then drains his wine. “You want to feel like a different person. Before you go back.”

“What I mean is, I hope you feel different soon,” Wonshik agrees, heat creeping from his throat up his cheeks. Maybe the sun hides it. When Taemin is grave like this, like he’s lived a dozen lifetimes in his skin, he’s so much like Taekwoon that it hurts to look at him. 

“I have to be good to him,” Taemin says, fork cleaving the layers of pastry in his tomato and strawberry tart. A breeze stirs his hair and he doesn’t brush it back from his brow. He keeps on cutting bite sized morsels and doesn’t bring a single one to his mouth. “Sometimes I think I don’t know how. I’ve never tried before. You know that.”

Wonshik taps the flat of his spoon against his buttermilk panna cotta and watches it tremble, blueberry juice and hibiscus sorbet running down the sides. He tastes it.

“Do you think I ever regret meeting you?” he asks with all that sweetness on his tongue. “Not then. Not now. You never lied to me. I wasn’t in love with you,” he adds, without heat. “He is. That’s the difference. No,” he cuts off Taemin’s eloquent glance. “We’re not talking about me.”

“What was your handler’s name, Jung?” Taemin squeezes his wrist across the table, so fleeting it shouldn’t settle warm beneath his skin. “Jinki says he keeps asking about you. If you’re safe.”

“So what does he tell him?” The sun is too bright in his eyes. He’s more than a little drunk, he realizes. 

“That you don’t need a handler anymore.” Taemin’s mouth thins with restraint. In their line of work, it’s hard not to pry. “Isn’t that the truth?”

On Monday, a day and a week after he and Taemin and close down the rooftop bar of the museum in the hazy orange afternoon, he’s not surprised when he finds himself kissing Jongin, with one of Taemin’s hard little hands squeezing his thigh in encouragement. He isn’t nervous. It feels inevitable, like the slow drag of the tide. It feels warm.

In the bed the sheets twist beneath their knees, a pillow catching Wonshik’s head when Taemin shoves him flat on his back. Jongin is the one with shaking hands, his lips swollen, eyes wide and glassy when Taemin tugs his briefs down his thighs and nudges him to straddle Wonshik’s hips. 

Jongin looks hummingbird fragile for all the muscle in his chest and his legs, his belly as hard as a paving stone, his wrists slender, tendons flexing at the hollow where his arm folds and in his wide shoulders. There’s not a scar on him save the one running jagged up his knee. Every time he moves some slender impossible angle forms.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, and means it. Jongin dips his head, bashful, but smiles when Wonshik’s palm finds the curve of his waist. He pours sweet little sighs into Wonshik’s mouth while Taemin opens him up, and when Wonshik fumbles blindly for the lube and strokes his cock between them he loses the thread of kissing entirely, lips moving wetly against Wonshik’s throat. Sometimes Taemin’s forearm grazes Wonshik’s cock, but he hardly needs the attention. His whole body is one hot pulse for Jongin’s trembling weight, for Taemin looming above them in gold lamplight, one palm fastened to the juncture of Jongin’s neck and shoulder for purchase.

“Almost forgot how big you are,” Taemin says to the air, as if for Wonshik’s benefit, when Jongin is the one hitching a breath in anticipation. “I forgot your name once or twice way back when, sorry” he laughs, not sounding sorry at all, and does _ something _ that makes Jongin choke and gasp. “Used to call you Lockjaw in my head until I could remember again. Wonshik, are you waiting for a written invitation? Grab his ass.”

Jongin makes a strangled, encouraging sound, tempered with a whine when Wonshik stops stroking him off to take two handfuls. There’s little yield to him, muscle meeting his fingertips. 

“Do you want him to fuck you, baby?” Taemin asks, and for all the heat in his skin Jongin is clear eyed when he pushes up onto one elbow and searches Wonshik’s face. 

“Yeah,” he says softly. “If you want?” 

At the first stretch Jongin laughs, thin and breathless, bracing his hands on Wonshik's chest. He's tight and sleek through the condom and Wonshik can feel his laughter here, too, feel him clench down appreciatively and drag him deeper when Taemin tugs his chin back for a kiss.

He's only a guest in Jongin's body, watching him arch up into Taemin's hands, his rhythm dictated like a puppet on strings. Jongin goes mumbly and boneless after he comes, eyes shut when he sags all his weight back against Taemin's chest. Like he feels safe. 

He can't hear what Taemin is murmuring into Jongin's skin, and he thinks he isn't meant to. 

Once Taekwoon reminded him of Taemin, elusive but insistent. Now time has turned itself inside out, and making Taemin comes feels like an exorcism.

When he lies awake listening to the bodies on either side of him breathe, he sifts through memories like strips of film. Immaculate and clear and bright. When he was picking up Hakyeon’s vintage turntable from the repair shop in an unfamiliar neighborhood and saw Taekwoon with a woman and a child, holding their hands. How Taekwoon had spotted him with some feline instinct from a block away and stilled, then dipped to murmur something against the woman’s hair.

His sister and his niece, he said, handing one paper cup of coffee to Wonshik and sipping the other. 

"I didn’t think you knew how to smile like that," Wonshik stared, already trying to remember the shape of it on his face.

Taekwoon picked at the sleeve of his cup, then caught himself and jammed the offending hand in the pocket of his coat. “Do you know what I think about, when I wait for you?” he asked. “How if you don’t walk in the door, you might be dead. I imagine someone telling your mother. Tell me again how I should be smiling.”

He thinks of the night Taekwoon stitched him up in a shuttered veterinarian’s office. Local anesthetic, the sick pull of the sutures against skin, the thunder rattling the windows. The power went out when Taekwoon’s hands were still on him. 

“You’re sure he didn’t see you,” Taekwoon repeated in the dark. The rain tried to drown out his voice, or maybe it was Taekwoon trying to drown, hoping for no answer. One Eye, he meant, but he didn’t say his name.

“Pretty sure,” Wonshik shivered, and for that heartbeat in the dark he thought he might tug Taekwoon down by his collar and kiss him, because if he was going to die he wanted to know how that felt.

“Stop finishing your friend’s fights for him,” Taekwoon murmured in a near empty theater as the opening credits rolled, all icy disapproval, and beneath the bandage Wonshik’s swollen knuckles ached. He wanted to say that Hyuk’s smart mouth was too quick for him, that was all, and Wonshik was better at taking a beating. But then Taekwoon would demand to know how that was advancing their goal, and Wonshik would have no answer. He couldn’t say _ that’s my little brother, _not unless he wanted to learn what would finally force Taekwoon’s hand into yanking him from the field. 

Wonshik learned how not to say things. Stupid things, dangerous things. Things a child would say. He pictured himself writing them down instead, in a leather bound book like his dad used for accounts while Wonshik sat under his desk at the back of the shop staging politics and forbidden romances between his toy cars. Binding the words to paper like prayers.

To Hyuk he doesn’t say, there’s still time for you to quit. Please don’t make me kill somebody to keep your hands clean. He doesn’t say, here’s a key to my safety deposit box, you can have it all if you get out of town tonight and never come back.

To Hakyeon he doesn’t say, I still believe you’re a good man, and I'd rather not shine a light on what that might mean about me. You could scrape your accounts clean and move to Bali and never look back. You don’t need this, you think you do but it’s never going to be enough and you’ll never stop looking over your shoulder. I think I could have fallen in love with you in another life, he doesn’t say.

To Taekwoon he never says, I owe you everything. Thank you for not being gentle when it would’ve killed me. I’m sorry I think about you fucking me so much. I’m sorry I dream about your hands. I’m sorry I thought about you when I was with Jaehwan and I’m sorry I lied. Thank you, he never says. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Let me thank you. Let me touch you. When this is all over, can I touch you. Can you teach my hands how to be good again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)


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